I agree that the information is important, but the "rat park" research was done in the '70s. It's not novel, and I suggest it's something people didn't want to hear.

I wonder why addiction is common among celebrities-- they aren't living in a deprived environment.

Here's my response. I had a LW-geared TL:DR which assumed shorter inferential distance and used brevity-aiding LW jargon, but then I removed it because I want to see if this makes sense to LW without any of that.

This debate boils down to a semantic confusion.

Lets consider the word "heat(1)". Some humans chose the word "heat" to mean "A specific subset of environmental conditions that lead to the observation of feeling hot, of seeing water evaporate..." and many other things too numerous to mention.

Once "heat" was defined, science could begin to quantify how much of it there was using "temperature". We can use our behavior to increase or decrease the heat, and some behaviors are objectively more heat-inducing than others.

But who defined heat in the first place? We did. We set the definition. It was an arbitrary decision. If our linguistic history had gone differently, "heat" could have meant any number of things.

If we were lucky, a neighboring culture would use "heat(2)" to mean "the colors red and yellow" and everyone would recognize that these were two separate words that meant different things but happened to be homonyms with a common root - since most warm things are red or yellow, it's easy to see how definitions diverge. No one would be so silly as to argue about heat(1) and heat(2). If we were unlucky, a neighboring culture might decide to use "heat(3)" to mean "subjective feelings resulting from temperature-receptor activation", and we'd have endless philosophical debates about what heat really is. All this useless debate because one culture decided to use "heat(3)" to refer to the subjective feeling of being hot, while another culture decided to use "heat(1)" to refer to a complex phenomenon which causes a bunch of observable effects, one of which is usually but not always the subjective experience of feeling hot.

One day, a group of humans which included one named Sam Harris decided to define "Good(1) and Best(1)" as "Well-Being among all Conscious Beings". (Aside - In an effort to address the central theme and avoid tangents, let's just assume that "Conscious Beings" here means "regular humans" and not create hypothetical situations containing eldritch beings with alien goals. Since we haven't rigorously defined "Well-Being" and "Conscious-Being", we won't go into the question of whether "Well-Being" is a coherent construct for all "Conscious Beings" . We can deal with that problem later - that's not the central issue. For now, we will simply go by our common intuitions of what those words mean.)

Can you measure "well-being" in humans? Sure you can! You can use questionnaires to measure satisfaction, you can measure health and vibrancy and do all sorts of things. And you can arrange your actions to maximize these measurements, creating the Best(1) Possible Universe. And some hypothesis about what actions you aught to take to reach the Best(1) Possible Universe are incorrect, while others are correct.

One day, a group of humans which did not include one named Sam Harris decided to define "Good(2)" as "The sum of all my goals". Can science measure that? Actually, yes! - I can measure my emotional response to various hypothetical situations, and try to scientifically pinpoint what my goals are. I can attempt to describe my goals, and sometimes I will be incorrect about my own goals, and sometimes I will be correct - we've almost all been in situations where we thought we wanted something, and then realized we didn't. Likewise, there is a certain set of actions that I can take to maximize the fulfillment of my goals, to reach my Best(2) Possible Universe. And I can use observation and logic to measure your goals as well, and calculate your Best(2) Possible Universe.

But can my goals themselves be incorrect? No - my goals are imbedded in my brain, in my software. My goals are physically a part of the universe. You can't point to a feature of the universe and call it "incorrect". You can only say that my goals are incompatible with yours, that our Best(2) Possible Universes are different. Mine is Better(2) for me, yours is Better(2) for you.

Our culture is unlucky, because Good(1) and Good(2) are homonyms whose definitions are far too close together. It doesn't make sense to ask which definition is "correct" and which is "wrong", any more than it makes sense to ask whether "Ma" means Mother (English) or Horse (Chinese). The entire argument stems from the two sides using the same word to mean entirely different things. It's a stupid argument, and there are no new insights gained from going back and forth on the matter of which arbitrary definition is better. If only Good(1) and Good(2) didn't sound so similar, there would be no confusion.

(Note: Of course, I've ridiculously oversimplified both Good(1) and Good(2), and I haven't gone into Good 1.1, Good 1.2, Good 2.1, Good 2.2, etc. But I think it's safe to say that most definitions of Good currently fall into either camp 1 or camp 2, and this argument is a misunderstanding between the definitional camps)

gwern specifically argued that small scale terrorism would be ineffective.

It's not about saving self-face or anything. It's about making sure you know what you would do if it were the case so it isn't unthinkable that it could be the case.

Maybe you are just more rational than the rest of us, but I definitely notice that it helps.

Did you read the article?

No. Allowing yourself a line of retreat helps disincentivize the less-rational parts of your brain from stubbornly insisting on continuing to defend a proposition after it is no longer viable.

With this kind of question that borders on political/identity issues, they very first thing you do is build your lines of retreat: If guns cause death, what should you do? If guns don't cause death, what should you do? If guns reduce death, what should you do? You need satisfactory non-straw answers for all of those cases before you are qualified to look at the facts. After you have those answers, you will find it much easier to be neutral.

I think you'd have to notice the (anti)correllation between gun control and violent death across countries/states/areas, if it exists, then look at the three hypotheses: guns cause death, death causes guns, something causes both. Try to eliminate hypotheses.

You could note that Canada has more guns per capita and less murder. You could control for the effect of legislation by finding different groups of people who kill each other with guns or don't who live in the same legislative areas. You could find a culturally homogenous group who are split by arbitrary political lines (i.e. toronto/detroit/buffalo/etc, that country that is split in two in the carribean). etc.

To me this just looks like a bias-manipulating "unpacking" trick - as you divide larger categories into smaller and smaller subcategories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes up and up. I could equally make cryonics success sound almost certain by lumping all the failure categories together into one or two big things to be probability-assigned, and unpacking all the disjunctive paths to success into finer and finer subcategories. Which I don't do, because I don't lie.

Also, yon neuroscientist does not understand the information-theoretic criterion of death.

Do you have a theory as to why there aren't enough good users, or why they are not writing good articles?

I think this site is dying because there's nothing interesting to talk about anymore. Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles, and idea threads where the highest comment has more votes than the thread itself (i.e. a crappy idea). Main is not much better. Go to archive.org and compare (date chosen randomly, aside from being a while ago). I don't think eternal september is the whole explanation here -- you only need 1 good user to write a good article.

I am 16 and I think I started reading this site 13. I think there is no need for another site. I also oppose any new forum/category of LW simply because interesting content here is getting thinner and thinner, half the discussion page is [META] ("Italics formatting is broken!") or [SEQ RERUN] and a new forum would dilute that even further.